VIDEO: CMA Contracting brings down Liddell power station stacks

The 168-metre high, 7,500-tonne reinforced concrete structures, at the decommissioned coal-fired plant, were demolished using more than 500 kg of high explosives on 26 May.

The demolition involved highly controlled, precision-engineered blasts, with hundreds of individual charges placed into pre-drilled holes to carefully weaken the base of each chimney, according to CMA’s client and site owner, energy company AGL.

Explosives were used to remove a section at the base, allowing each stack to fall in a planned direction, with the event carried out as a single, tightly sequenced blast using millisecond delays to control how the structures collapsed.

“Liddell power station has played an important role in Australia’s energy system. The demolition will pave the way for the continued transformation of the site,” commented AGL chief operations and construction officer Matthew Currie.

The event was a major milestone in a two-year demolition programme; the result of tens of thousands of work hours invested by AGL, the local community and regulatory stakeholders, and CMA’s delivery, inhouse and third-party engineering, with specialist blasting teams.

“From detailed methodology development, structural and blast engineering coordination, and pre-weakening and drilling works to explosive charge installation, exclusion zone implementation, and environmental monitoring controls – this was nothing but a team effort.

“Our carefully sequenced felling methodology was tailored to site constraints, adjacent (live) assets and broader demolition staging requirements,” a spokesperson from CMA Contracting told Demolition & Recycling International.

The event was broadcast to more than 33,000 people who tuned in on blast day to see the fells via a live stream hosted by AGL.